Entertainment

Graham Powell, Special to Kingston This Week
The duo of Kris and Dee, featuring Dee McNeil, left and Kris Abbott, will be performing a special fundraising show on Friday, May 4, at the Ban Righ Hall Fireside Room.

Partners in life and partners in song, the sublimely talented duo of Kris and Dee have been making beautiful music together for almost a decade, but only decided last year to record and release some of their creations.

Kris is Kris Abbott, former guitarist/vocalist for popular 1990s rockers The Pursuit of Happiness, while Dee is Dee McNeil, singer and bassist for the former Toronto alternative band The Strap-Ons.

After meeting at a show in Toronto, the pair realized they not only wanted to unite their individual creative gifts, but their lives.

And what blossomed forth musically from this pairing culminated in the release of Still Here Inside, in May of last year.

They are playing a fundraising show, May 4, at the Ban Righ Hall Fireside Room at 8 p.m.

Recording in part at The Bathouse and the couple's own home studio, the songs on this independently released CD are deep, heartfelt, powerful and poetic, but also a departure from what fans of Abbott and McNeil's former groups may expect.

"We came to Kingston on vacation a few years ago, and went over to Wolfe Island to go to the Wolfe Island Music Festival to check out some of the acts, and we were staying over on the island and writing songs, and all of a sudden we just said, 'Do you want to keep writing? Maybe we should keep writing?' Because it was so natural to us, and we just enjoyed it," said Abbott in a recent sit-down interview with Kingston This Week.

"We just said, 'Let's just write without any expectation or any boundaries. Let's just write for the sake of writing. So we started to, and then it kind of evolved into a conversation about making a record."

Abbott produced the record, doing the initial tracks and later the overdubs in her home studio, with the bed tracks done under the watchful eye of Aaron Holmberg at The Bathouse.

As the group's singer, McNeil is responsible for the lyrics, while Abbott pens the music, but it's still very much a collaborative and co-operative process to cobble together songs for Kris and Dee.

"The genesis for a song is different almost all the time. It's kind of all over the map," said McNeil.

"Sometimes it starts with Dee and the lyrics and the fragment of the melody and then we kind of work from there, and the song starts to come together. The lyrics are always Dee's and the music and production is primarily me," Abbott continued.

"My role is often to interpret what she is writing musically, so I work on it for a bit, and throw it back to her and it goes back and forth. So we're collaborating all down the line."

Abbott talks admiringly about McNeil's discipline as a writer, journaling her thoughts and observations every day, very much in the vein of Rush lyricist Neil Peart.

"Dee is absolutely diligent about writing every single day. There is not a day that goes by that she doesn't write, and often lyrics will come out of that. She will work on something conceptually, and then peel it back as to how she can write lyrics about it," she said.

"I think our best writing happens when we're relaxed, and we get together and we start building off each other's ideas, and then at some point I usually disappear and turn the lyrics into something," McNeil added.

"And you need to have the time to sort of process life and your thoughts. You need to write about something that matters, I guess, at least to me.

"A lot of the songs are autobiographical to some extent. They are not word for word autobiographical, but it's more like 'if it can happen to me, it can happen to someone else.' But the songs will always have a grounding of truth. There's nothing fabricated or made up or phony. Each song has some basis in reality."

Abbott said she worked hard to craft a unique sound and vibe on Still Here Inside, mixing the intimacy and immediacy of the singer/songwriter, with the dynamic of a band setting. (The band features drummer Anna Rees and Wil McGonegal on guitar.)

"You typically approach a song and you build the music around the singer, or, conversely, you build the band tacks. But I wanted to do both in one song. So at times you're really kind of focused on the sound of Dee, and her voice, as the singer/songwriter, and then the band kind of wraps in and around that," she explained.

"That all goes along with the idea of allowing people the time to reflect, so there's room to reflect on what's being said, but the music also emotionally supports what's being said.

"It's sort of like talking in musical metaphor. Dee says certain things in her lyrics and then what I hope I do musically is fill in the spaces between the things that the words don't say - wordlessly moving the story along."

Kris and Dee are devoted to their music, and love the process of writing, recording and performing their songs, but they are also content to not grasp the big brass music industry ring.

Both have day jobs: Abbott has a business where she records personal life or business stories and creates a kind of audio scrapbook, while McNeil teaches physiotherapy part time at Queen's and is also a part-time heath care consultant.

"That's been our goal from the start, that both of us just work part time, and keep our feet grounded in real life. We don't really want to be in the position where we're feeding ourselves through music, because we don't want to change why we do it, so we don't want to rely on it," McNeil said.

"And we try not to overplay. We don't aspire to be a full-time gigging band. We're trying to play regularly regionally, and that's comfortable for us. We want to play an amount that never makes people feel like, 'Oh I just heard them. I don't want to see them again.' So it keeps us hungry, it keeps our audience hungry, and then the day job thing, like Dee said, helps us remember that there's life out there."

And, as with the show at Ban Righ Hall, both Abbott and McNeil also want to use their music for a higher purpose than just self-fulfillment, but to also give something back.

"Community involvement is something we talked about early on. We didn't want this to be all about us. We want to not just take from the world, so we try to do things that are to both satisfy our own creative needs, but also give back to the community. We already donate a portion of the profits from every show to charities of our choice."

The duo is already well into the process of writing songs for a new CD, which may come out in the late summer or fall.

"The first phase of the songwriting is done, and we're having a second pass through it, and doing some pre-production on the songs," said Abbott, adding that the material will be an extension of the material and feeling from Still Here Inside.

"I think that the parameters of what we're going to do will just be a little bigger, and the space that's in there will be a little more extreme and the angst will be stronger."

Tickets for the show at Ban Righ Hall are $20 and available at Brian's Record Option or by calling 613-533-2976. Only 90 will be sold.